How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different...

This paper is the first to use program administrative data from Brazil's National Employment System (SINE) to assess the impact of SINE job interview referrals on labor market outcomes. Data for a five-year period (2012-2016) are used to evaluate the impact of SINE on employment probability,...

In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of the participation of refugees in integration programmes intended to help them gain employment. The specific programmes considered are the Competence Check programme and the Integration Year programme that were introduced in Austria around the time...

We empirically analyze the heterogeneous welfare effects of unemployment insurance and social assistance. We estimate a structural life-cycle model of singles' and married couples' labor supply and savings decisions. The model includes heterogeneity by age, education, wealth, sex and household...

This paper analyses deviations from full employment in EU countries, compared with the US and the UK. We apply the Beveridge (full-employment-consistent) rate of unemployment (BECRU), derived from the unemployment-vacancies relationship. The BECRU is the level of unemployment that minimises the...

This paper analyses (age-adjusted) employment rates by gender and education. We find that malefemale gender gaps and high-low education gaps in employment vary markedly across European Union (EU) countries and regions, with larger gaps existing in Eastern and Southern Europe than in Nordic and...

This paper provides new evidence for the evolution of regional unemployment rates in Spain over the 1980-2000 period. We argue that interactive dynamic systems of labour demand, wage setting, and labour force equations (i) allow for a richer interpretation of regional disparities, and (ii) can...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model - even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the wage...

This paper provides evidence that finishing school when labour markets are weak leads to poor subsequent labour market prospects, particularly those leaving school at younger ages. Using administrative register data from Denmark, we find that these scarring effects are larger and more persistent...

Much of the job search literature assumes bilateral meetings between workers and firms. This ignores the frictions that arise when meetings are actually multilateral. I analyze the magnitude of these frictions by presenting an equilibrium job search model with an endogenous number of contacts....